Responsiveness, scalability, availability, usability and security: the five key criteria against which financial systems are measured. But despite the enormous amount of time and money invested, many systems fall short in at least one, if not more, of these areas, costing the financial services industry millions of pounds every year.

More money?
The significant investment involved in implementing and integrating a platform makes it difficult to create the business case to spend yet more, if it has failed to live up to expectations. Alternatively, your systems may be on a decommissioning path. But wherever you are in your systems’ lifecycle, if your platform is failing to reach the levels of operational excellence required are your only options either to ‘put up with it’ or to throw it all away and start again? With the former at least you know the problems ahead – until something new happens; the latter can bring a whole new set of issues.

Ripples
The impact of a poorly performing system can be felt within your department, throughout your organisation, and at times by your clients.

Achieving Quality of Service
Rule Financial can help you achieve the Quality of Service you require from your financial systems by making what you already have work harder for you. Our independent, holistic view is platform and supplier agnostic. Rule helps clients understand the underlying reasons behind their technology and ensuing business issues by looking at all aspects of their systems, from the database, client and server right down to analysing bytes on the network.

Our technical excellence is strengthened by our deep domain knowledge. We understand how your business works, which means we help you manage, analyse and adapt your current systems appropriately. We enable our clients to develop a proportionate response to the issues at hand and alleviate pressure on operational units so they can focus on their day jobs.

What’s involved?
We draw on our extensive technical and domain expertise to understand your challenges and provide a cost effective solution. We will streamline your systems, enabling extensive cost savings, while helping you to create a more agile business.

Our track record of creating long term relationships with our clients stems from providing targeted problem analysis, solution development and quality assurance through:

• Stability: eradicating avoidable outages by hardening the application architecture, improving deployment and changing implementation procedures.

• Architecture review: examining your application’s ability to meet current business requirements, to change quickly, and to remain in peak condition.

• Capacity proving: identifying where demand outstrips capacity and providing solutions to scale appropriately to meet SLAs.

• Performance tuning: Identifying code enhancements, load balancing, data caching, server configuration, hardware recommendations and strategies to remove processing bottlenecks.

• Performance testing: Determining how fast specific aspects of a system perform under particular loads; which can also validate and verify other quality attributes of the system, such as scalability, reliability and resource usage.

• Availability and disaster recovery: Identifying single points of failure and eradicating them to prevent unplanned outages and allow you to keep systems available when planned maintenance takes place.

• Usability review: Examining the principles behind a system’s operational excellence and ease of use, and understanding what that means for your business.

• Security: Strengthening systems against internal and external security vulnerabilities, including: auditing, authentication and authorisation strategies.